Fitz takedown

Sorry for the lack of posts -- we've been swimming in the undertow of unfunded city pension liabilities -- but the time away has allowed more reactions to the Fitzgerald-Flaherty shale spat yesterday, including a "Full Marcellus" takedown from Chad Hermann. Let's take it from the top:

From these first three sentences, Mr. Fitzgerald’s email demonstrates almost everything that is wrong, and that is not likely to be right any time soon, with the modern political campaign: a concern first and foremost with raising money; a concern almost as first and foremost with being able to show people from whom you want to raise money and be taken seriously that you are already raising money; an obsession with fundraising that relegates everything else, including policy development and meaningful voter contact, to the margins of the daily schedule; a communicate-first, ask-questions-later emphasis on immediate response and even more immediate gratification that conspires to produce ill-typed (and therefore ill-spelled and ill-punctuated), ill-considered missives of all kinds; a certainty in the self, and in the self-righteous, that allows a candidate and his campaign to pretend that there is no need to reconcile his campaign rhetoric with his campaign behavior. 

The communications prof has plenty more to say while going through the entire Fitzgerald email text.

Photo: The Undertaker's tombstone piledriver.